I'd also like to amend before anyone says this, yeah, I agree that using native frameworks is actually superior and developers should prefer them, but I doubt that liquid glass consistency concerns would push many developers into adopting the native frameworks, so Apple should be interested in providing guidelines that at least help maintain design consistency.

In macOS 26 Apple enforced the squircle shape for app icons. If an icon doesn't match the new format, it gets "plated" with a gray background.

I noticed that a few apps that weren't updated for a while had their icons shown without extra plating. This surprised me, since all macOS icons before version 26 are transparent images with graphics and shadows baked in.

It seems macOS 26 automatically detects if old app icon image uses the official icon template and doesn't have any protrusions.

Also something I noticed when researching this, besides altering the frame shape and adding a border around it, macOS 26 will do edge detection on the app icons and will add effects like gradient and shine to them.

If you open the app package properties and copy the icon from there, you will get the icon with system effects baked into it, not the source icon stored in the package.

It is all over. Google has discontinued its Privacy Sandbox APIs intended to replace third-party cookies in Chrome and Android. The company initially planned to phase out third-party cookies by 2022 but delayed the move repeatedly due to industry resistance and low adoption of alternative technologies. In spring 2025, Google abandoned the cookie deprecation initiative altogether. Six months later, it also decided to halt promotion and integration of many associated privacy-focused APIs.

The discontinued technologies include IP Protection, Topics API, Attribution Reporting, Private Aggregation, Shared Storage, Protected Audience, Related Website Sets, requestStorageAccessFor, Related Website Partition, Select URL, Protected App Signals, SDK Runtime, and On-Device Personalization. Google will retain only those APIs already implemented in other browsers: FedCM for privacy-preserving identity management, CHIPS for partitioned cookie storage, and Private State Token for bot detection without cross-site identifiers.

Cookies remain alive.

This is great news! Privacy Sandbox was neither private, nor a sandbox, despite its name. All these APIs would just promote sharing extra data with advertisers.

I suspect they did this because they decided to not get rid of third party cookies in Chrome, so all the smoke and mirrors called 'Privacy Sandbox' are not needed anymore.

Turning off third party Cookies in Chrome is still much easier than the convoluted misleading menu Privacy Sandbox was. Though I'll still recommend my peers to not use anything that doesn't support uBlock Origin.

On Pavel Durov's Decentralized LLM Compute Network

Pavel Durov announced an open network that would give out TON cryptocurrency for GPU compute.

Let's set aside the use of cryptocurrency that is volatile as heck and additional overhead of distributed computing for already quite power hungry hallucinating text prediction machines. I want to scrutinize the security of the concept.

The more likely approach:
They can employ Trusted Execution Environment present in NVIDIA GPUs. You encrypt your data with an Nvidia key, and only a genuine Nvidia graphics card can decrypt it. It won't give you, the card owner, the decrypted data, but will encrypt the result with the user's key.

Edit: This is a gross simplification of the process. Actually, you deploy an image onto a remote machine that runs on CPUs TEE, and from it, using NVIDIA's SDK you can also verify that the GPU is real. Prompt encryption/decryption can be implemented inside the image. All communications between your image in the CPU TEE and GPU TEE are encrypted. This way you can also get proof that the GPU runs the model it claims to be for free. Of course, you don't store the key in the image, you do DH key exchange as it runs (maybe, you use user's public key hash as nonce for the TEE Attestation Report to avoid MITM attacks, since there is no CA here but the vendors).

The only problem is that if a single one of these cards gets hacked, it will unleash absolute hell across the entire network 🙂 (in other words: it is not good if even a single node node in a zero-trust network can read your messages)

There is a fool proof solution to this problem that I was very sceptical about until this day, when I decided to finally look into it. It's called Homomorphic Encryption.

It allows you to do neural network inference on encrypted data without actually being able to read the data. Yeah, it might sound insane, but after reading into it and understanding key concepts, I think it's probably fine. But it's also probably not what's gonna be done in this project for reasons described below (TL;DR — Impractical on large scale).

This section requires you to have basic understanding about how neural networks work.

So this announcement made me look into how neural networks work with homomorphic encryption, as it's the only reasonable way to implement such a feature without leaking all user communications to random people on the internet or hoping on a vendor.

In short:
1. There's a way to encrypt two numbers, do addition or multiplication on them, and then get the correct result back on decryption. Do your own research, if curious.
2. Generative transformers with attention algorithms (esp. important — activation functions) can be approximated by using polynomials, which is just adding and multiplying numbers.
Combine these two and you can run an LLM on encrypted data, and get encrypted output back, that only the creator of the data can read!

Yes, instead of 0..1 range you get huge numbers, you can't tell if the neuron is a 1 or a 0, but because we approximate all the neuron logic with the allowed operations, the math guarantees the result to be correct on decryption (to a certain precision)

This method is well-suited for relatively small models, or models that can be given a long time to think in the background. Stuffing DeepSeek into FHE will either result in a very bad and slow model, or a very expensive but still slow model that requires a ton of resources and simply cannot be optimized with modern MoE tricks; it has to be a dense model, where every neuron is evaluated. It also means you can't have dynamic output length using the end of output token, you'd have to generate a fixed number of tokens for every request.

It's almost certainly not the way they are gonna go with, though, they'll probably just use TEE, will be sending your conversations with the LLMs to random people on the internet, and you'll just have to pray that the random node isn't an NSO Group honeypot with a jailbroken CPU/GPU.

There's a chance we'll get distributed LLMs in the future, but not today

Designers need to realize that in UX the only thing worse than no customizability, is the unpredictable automated customizability you can't opt out from.

Lol nice, something I've spent a bit of time on to piece together is now available to read in a single place as a long spec!

https://github.com/openpcc/openpcc/blob/main/whitepaper/openpcc.pdf

One more reason why Safari sucks for web developers:
It deletes all local site data if the site wasn't used for 7 days.

I guess it could have been relevant back when cross-origin talk was allowed in Safari at all. It is not anymore. But the behavior is still here.

If you've made a web To-Do app that uses localStorage/IndexedDB/..., your user creates a list in there, and 8 days later it's all gone — that's the reason.

And it is not part of standardized behavior, you have to know about this quirk and use one of the methods to ask the user to persist the data. Or create an auth system and store everything on server.

https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/

Safari is the modern IE.

Android Quick Share now works with AirDrop on iPhone, starting on Pixel 10 by Abner Li

https://9to5google.com/2025/11/20/android-quick-share-airdrop-pixel-10/

MPEG LA (now is VIA LA, I guess) using all their cosmic powers to make sure their new codecs receive zero adoption.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus/

Whoah, finally Google will allow you to change your Google Account @gmail.com email address without deleting Gmail.

https://9to5google.com/2025/12/24/google-change-gmail-addresses/

Since day one, Google Chrome used to just update. Silently. You open Chrome and return to your last tabs without realizing it was updated [unless you notice they redesigned something].

But since a few years ago Chrome team decided it's important to show users a toast "Chrome was updated". OK, why would I care?

Or even worse, instead of opening my last tab, it opens the What's New page. There is no option to turn it off.

Users open browser to do what's on their mind, not read your changelogs.

Homebrew decided to break packages for end users. Maintainers decided that big packages like ffmpeg by default should contain only modules used by other Homebrew dependencies. e.g. in ffmpeg, they removed most of the codecs, you now must install ffmpeg-full and manually add it to PATH.

In my opinion, it is incorrect to treat packages that are largely used as CLI tools as something that can be broken into a minimal distribution. You don't treat CLI tools as libraries.

Additionally, the current suggested ffmpeg-full package replacement is not exposed as a CLI tool by default either.

So if you want to install ffmpeg for personal use, instead of the well-known

homebrew install ffmpeg

you now have to run

homebrew install ffmpeg-full
brew link --overwrite ffmpeg-full

I think maintainers could have added a new package and updated dependencies instead of confusing CLI users.

They are doing this to imagemagick too, by the way.

Removes Creator Studio upsells in iWork (Numbers/Pages/Keynote)

1. Settings › General › Device Management › "+" button
2. Pick the file
3. Continue › Install

Removing Ads in the iWork Suite

Starting with version 15.1, the iWork suite is now part of the Creator Studio bundle.

The apps were switched to a freemium model, with old apps not receiving updates anymore, and new apps being full of Creator Studio subscription upsells across the menu bar options and other surfaces.

Personally
Besides the "Premium" stock imagery, the rest Creator Studio-paywalled features in iWork are just GenAI slop. From the Creator Studio bundle, I interacted only with the iWork suite, which was free with no upsells, and Pixelmator Pro, for which I bought a perpetual license. I have no interest in Final Cut, Logic Pro, Motion, or other apps from the suite, so I can't justify paying $129/year for it.

On the Apple Support website there's a mention that there is an MDM configuration option to suppress these prompts for corporate devices.

Thus, I've made a .mobileconfig file that applies this setting to Keynote/Pages/Numbers.

From my testing, it works and removes all most annoying instances. I only noticed one leftover in the app menu.

Safari doesn't support the Vibration API, but in iOS 18 they added a non-standard "switch" attribute to checkboxes that turns them into a vibrating switch, and people figured out how to use it to create full-fledged vibrations.

Telegram Desktop (Qt) 6.6.1 added an experimental setting for unlimited recent stickers 🎉

Settings › Advanced › Scroll to the end › Experimental settings › Scroll to the end › Unlimited recent stickers

It is described as "Display as many stickers as server provides"

Oh nice, so all software from iterate.ch is apparently a rug pull now because they decided to change the business model, screwing me as their existing customer.

Exhibit A.
I purchased Cyberduck from the App Store originally, but I quickly learned that the version is limited and switched to the side loaded version, activating it with an App Store receipt. One day this option was just removed with no explanation. Fine. I'll just buy another license.

Exhibit B
I also had Mountain Duck acquired from the App Store, I kept using it. Today I launched it, only to witness money extortion, with no way to use the software I bought!

In GitHub Discussions they said that they were changing the model from perpetual to major updates, and that they can't force existing App Store customers to migrate to the new model. If I want to, uh, use the license *I already paid for*, I must go ask support for a license key and download the old version manually.

How about I ditch your rug pull of a company instead? I understand your decision to change the model, maybe it wasn't sustainable, whatever, but this is not the way to do it.

If anyone ever seeks for an opinion on the software from this company, I will have to make them aware that they consider such treatment to be OK.

They could have left the original app alone without nudging me to go through their support, they could have automated the app store receipt exchange, they could have allowed me to grandfather my license in for the future versions if their expenses allow that. Unfortunately, they did none of that.

lmfao Google redrew their emoji AGAIN